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In the past few days, I've noticed a lot of reminders of Whitney around me. Just today, I was on the phone at work and was drinking from this bottle of water. As I was on hold with the State Department of Health, I noticed Whitney's name right there on the bottle!! Now, yes, I know that this label has been on this particular brand of water for quite some time. But it is now a gentle reminder of our sweet daughter. She is never far from our minds... she's in almost every thought we have. Work is going good this week... I just wish that I could come home to my baby girl.

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Spring has sprung around these parts of California, and I have the runny nose, stuffy head and watery eyes to prove it. But even through my clouded, itchy vision, I can see that the colors popping up around me are beautiful! This morning when I left my house, I noticed how HUGE and billowy this tree in our front yard has gotten. It seemed to have opened up like an umbreall overnight! I love all the different hues of green that are in our front yard. Very soon, colors will be popping up in some of the hydrangea bushed! I can't wait!!!

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Our car loan is paid off!! We received an incredible blessing that allowed us to pay off our car loan in full. Today we got the letter that made it official! Yay! It is so nice to have one thing paid off. Now all that is left is our home and Sean's student loans. We'll be putting aside the money that would have gone towards our car payment to help with fixing up the Sean's truck. Its currently not working (we think its the alternator or the starter- yikes!) and we just need to find a mechanic who will fix it. So not having a car payment on top of that is truly such a blessing! And when there's no work to be done on the truck, the extra money will go towards knocking out that pesky student loan as fast as possible!! Yay! Who ever thought paying down debt would be fun!?

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David had to leave today. We had a good morning at church (all of us went together!) then had lunch at In-N-Out. This next week I start back to work at my full Monday-Thursday schedule. I have a lot to do, so I am ready to get back to it. We had a good visit with David, and I can't believe it has been so long since I've seen him... over 2 years! Hopefully it won't be so long the next time. Tonight, Sean went downtown with our junior high group. This is the kids' Spring Break week, and they are spending a few days downtown working with some of our local missions. When Sean left I went to my friend Christine's house. She's my Mary Kay team leader and is showing me how to get everything started. After that, we went over to Megan's (Jimmy's wife) house to watch New Moon. We are all getting really excited for the new movie to come out this summer!!!

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We left San Fran this morning around 10:30. We stayed the night at the Hilton in Union Square. I've stayed here before and its a great hotel. Sean and I got up and brought up Starbucks for us all for breakfast. We have a very smooth ride home (compared to the trip up!) Most of the afternoon, we just relaxed. David and I went to the mall for a bit. He needed some new jeans-- I had tried to sew a hole in his old pair, and while it looked ok, I wanted to treat him to a new pair. Afterall, he's a college kid living on coffee and pasta... I thought some new jeans would be nice. :-) So we shopped around at the Gap for a bit then came home. We cooked Tri Tip for dinner and it was delicious! We were all pretty tired by the end of the day, but it was another great day spent with my 'baby' brother!

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This morning we got up and headed to San Francisco for the day/night. We stared with some donuts this morning and headed out on our way. About halfway there, we stopped for a bathroom break. That bathroom break turned into more than an hour detour because Sean locked the keys in our car!! We were close to an auto parts store, so they let us borrow a slim jim to try to get in the door. However, as we were working the slim jim, a kid shouted to us from his vehicle in the drive through lane: "Hey buddy! Slim jims don't work on Hondas!" This kid obviously appeared to have experience with these kinds of things, so we took his word for it. Just as I was about to break down and call a locksmith, an old man in his beat up Civic motioned to me. He'd been on the phone the whole time we had been trying to get into our car, and when I walked over there, he told me he was on the phone with AAA. He let us use his AAA card and waited with us until the locksmith had opened our doors!! How nice was that!? We offered to get him some food or give him money, but all he said was, "I just want my health man." He said this as he lit up another cigarette! Ha!

As we left the parking lot, driving behind our "angel" Sean noticed that the frame around his license plate said "You just can't fix stupid." Ha! We all had a good laugh... especially when the guy drove up beside us and told us that they license plate was fitting for whoever locked the keys in the car! Touche! We had another adventure when we stopped off the highway to eat lunch somewhere in Oakland. (I later learned that just pulling off the highway somehwere along Oakland was not a good idea.) As we were eating our Subway sandwiches, a guy sitting at a table across from us started stroking his face with a $100 bill and saying, "I'm the money man!" He was clearly talking to Sean and wanting a response, so Sean said "I'm the food man!" It was funny.

One more crazy story from our trip up to the bay: We were about an hour out from San Fran driving on I-580 when I saw a huge semitruck in front of us start to cross horizontally across all 6 lanes of traffic! We were the next car behind him, and as we kept driving forward, the truck began to tip on its side, nearly tipping over onto the cars in front of him. We were in the middle of 6 lanes of traffic going 70+ miles per hour, closing in on this crashing semi! I held onto the door handle and just thought, "Is this it?!" Sean had amazing presence of mind and calmly and safely guided us out of the way of the semi. I was so glad we prayed before we left this morning, as God's angels had clearly protected us at least 3 times on this trip already! It was quite a day.

After about a 5 hour drive (which should have been less than 3), we finally made it to San Fran. It was great fun. We saw China town and hung out on the Wharf. We had dinner at my favorite restaurant, The Crab House and finished the evening with coffee and crepes. It was great and I loved spending the time with David!!

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My brother got into town late last night. It is so good to see him! I had to work this morning and I had a meeting out of town tonight, but we got to have dinner together. After dinner, we went to a memorial service hosted by Angel Babies. It was really nice. They read off all the names of the Angel Babies who were born in February (Whitney included) as well as all the hospice patients who died in February. It was at a church on the westside of town, and there were quite a lot of people there. It was nice to hear Whitney's name read and to remember her. I was really glad that my brother was able to be here and go to it with us, too. After the memorial service, I headed out to my meeting. It went really well and I think our abstinence education team is going to get into a new school in that area. Yay!